All Saints’ Day

November 1 · a feast for all the saints in glory · the day the relics were shown at Wittenberg, and the eve on which the Reformation began.

The early churches kept the anniversary of each martyr’s death at the place where he suffered, and as the martyrs multiplied under persecution a common day came to be set for them all. In the West, Boniface IV consecrated the Pantheon in Rome, the old temple of all the gods, to the Virgin Mary and all the martyrs on May 13, 609 or 610. Gregory III (731–741) dedicated a chapel in St. Peter’s to all the saints and fixed its anniversary on November 1, and Gregory IV (827–844) extended the feast to the whole Church.1 The evening before, All Hallows’ Eve, gave the English-speaking world its Halloween. Loraine Boettner saw in the Pantheon’s conversion a sign of what followed: “Thus the worship of Mary and the saints replaced that of the heathen gods and goddesses, and it was merely a case of one error being substituted for another.”2

Rome keeps November 1 as a solemnity and a holy day of obligation, on which the faithful are bound to attend Mass (canon 1246). The feast honors all who are in glory, known and unknown, and rests on Rome’s doctrine of the communion of saints. The saints in heaven “do not cease to intercede with the Father for us, as they proffer the merits which they acquired on earth” (§956). When the Church keeps their memorials, “through their merits she begs for God’s favors” (§1173), and the faithful are taught, “We can and should ask them to intercede for us and for the whole world” (§2683). The “prayers and good works of all the saints” are also counted in the treasury from which the Church dispenses indulgences (§1477).

The Reformation began on the eve of this feast. The Castle Church at Wittenberg had been consecrated in 1503 as the church of All Saints,3 and there Frederick the Wise displayed his relics each All Saints’ Day to pilgrims seeking indulgences. On October 31, 1517, Luther posted the Ninety-Five Theses on its door. In 1521 Justus Jonas used the same feast to call for an end to indulgences and private masses,4 and on All Saints’ Day 1533 Nicholas Cop, rector of the University of Paris and Calvin’s friend, “did not praise the saints but rather proclaimed Christ as the only mediator with God.”5 The Lutherans confessed at Augsburg that “the memory of saints may be set before us, that we may follow their faith and good works,” but that Scripture “teaches not the invocation of saints or to ask help of saints, since it sets before us the one Christ as the Mediator, Propitiation, High Priest, and Intercessor.”6 The Westminster divines went further and set aside the feast with the rest of the calendar: “Festival days, vulgarly called Holy-days, having no warrant in the word of God, are not to be continued.”7

In Scripture every believer is a saint, “called to be saints” (Romans 1:7; 1 Corinthians 1:2; Philippians 1:1), sanctified by the one offering of Christ and not by a later decree of canonization (Hebrews 10:10, 14). There is “one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5), who “ever liveth to make intercession” for those who come to God by him (Hebrews 7:25). The faithful dead are a “cloud of witnesses” whose race is finished; we honor them not by praying to them but by “looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith” as they did (Hebrews 12:1–2), and by following “them who through faith and patience inherit the promises” (Hebrews 6:12). See also All Souls’ Day.


Roman Catholicism

Notes

  1. Francis Mershman, “All Saints”, in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 1 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1907). ↩
  2. Loraine Boettner, Roman Catholicism (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1962), chap. 7, “Mary,” sec. 3, “Historical Development.” ↩
  3. “History,” Schlosskirche Wittenberg, which gives the consecration as January 17, 1503. ↩
  4. Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (Nashville: Abingdon, 1950). Summarized. ↩
  5. Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, rev. ed. (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013), chap. 5, “Glory unto God: John Calvin.” ↩
  6. Augsburg Confession (1530), art. 21, “Of the Worship of the Saints.” ↩
  7. The Directory for the Publick Worship of God (London, 1645), “An Appendix, touching Days and Places for Publick Worship,” as transcribed at Heidelblog. ↩
  8. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997). Section numbers (§) link to the online text at vatican.va. Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.